Keeping a Wish List

Great Idea Wish List

The best metaphor I have come up with for wading through the plethora of great ideas I encounter through social media and blogs is an Amazon Wish List. I oppose this metaphor to the cliche of trying to "keep up with the Jonses." As a connected educator, I do feel the pressure to keep up with the current trends, especially in regards to edtech. But if I adopt this attitude I will implement ideas that may be good, but are implemented at the wrong time and without a complete understanding. It would be like impulse buying a cast-iron skillet because I saw someone on America's Test Kitchen cook an amazing steak.

Instead, I try to take the Amazon Wish List approach to the new ideas I come across online. If I read a blogpost that describes a new tool or website that may be valuable, I add it to a mental "buy it later list" that I keep in my head. This technique allows me to track if something is just a fad or truly has lasting value. Instead of jumping on the latest trend, I can ask myself a few months later if people are still talking about this idea. Does this idea meet a real need in my classroom? Will this idea help me supplement my teaching? Frequently ideas I encounter online may not make it into my classroom until six months or a year down the road. The point of implementation usually occurs when I hit a roadblock in lesson planning and then I remember that idea I had mentally saved in my "Edtech Wish List."

One current example is the use of student blogging and digital badges. Both of these ideas have been around for awhile and I have known that I wanted to try them out. But the right situation hadn't occurred in which I could implement these ideas naturally in my class. But this quarter I am teaching a nine-week digital photography course and both of these ideas fit in perfectly. I wanted my students to track their progress as photographers and celebrate their successes. Blogging helps them reflect on that they are learning and digital badges let me celebrate their milestones.

So in the constant flow of ideas that you run across on the internet, don't be ashamed to add them to a "Wish List" (mental, digital, or written down somewhere) to implement later. You will probably implement the idea better and with more energy this way. And be patient with others who have not implemented in their classrooms that one idea that now you can't live without. It may be on their wishlist and they are just waiting for that right moment to put it into action.

Station Rotation for A Christmas Carol Unit Part 1

I was inspired to try Station Rotations after reading a blogpost by Catlin Tucker. I had already tried stations with our Poe unit with some success, so I decided to try the idea again with our Dickens unit. I had found background materials for Dickens' story from a theatre that has been performing the play for over three decades. I decided to adapt the material into four different stations. I will describe each station below, along with my rationale.

The first station was a half-paper and half-tech station. I like to always mix up the stations so that the students are not using their Chromebooks at each station. This choice provides variety for the students and gives them a break from staring at a screen. This station was focused on the problems faced by big cities. The students read a brief description of London during Dickens time and then opened an envelope with six big city problems written on slips of paper. Students began by sorting the slips on their own from the most important problem facing a city to the least important problem. I wanted each student to think through this complex problem on their own before discussing it with others. After each student had sorted their list, they then tried to come to a group consensus about what the correct order should be. If the group could not come to a consensus about the entire list, they should at least agree on what should be the number one problem.

When creating the station I had to decide on the best way for students to collect what they had decided. I tossed around using a paper graphic organizer, a Google Doc, etc. I decided to use a Google Form so that students could rank the different city problems and which problem they felt was the greatest. The Google Form adds the advantage that when all students have completed the form I can create a visual of their choices. We can discuss as a class why certain rankings were more popular than others.

The final step in this station, and the final page of the Google Form, was to write a letter to Queen Victoria about how the group planned to address the problem. I created sentence frames for the students to use in their letter.

The students spent twenty-five minutes at this station. I was pleasantly surprised the wide variety of rankings that each group made and intrigued by the discussions they had with one another.

The next blog post will describe the second station students rotated through: What Do I Value Most?

Vocabulary Instruction

In light of the discussion in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) of vocabulary instruction, I have recently revised the way I teach vocabulary. The first modification I have made is making sure that the words I choose for direct instruction are tier two words. The CCSS define tier two words as general academic words. These are words that students will come across in many different disciplines and therefore they have wide applicability. I usually pull words for direct instruction from whatever novel, short stories, or nonfiction texts the students are about to read. Every two weeks I choose ten tier words for whole class instruction.

The second change I have made to my vocabulary instruction is how I present the words to my students. Recently I had the chance to watch a webinar on vocabulary instruction presented by Catlin Tucker, a high school English teacher in northern California. She suggested presenting the words to students in context, that is, in a sentence that provides context clues to the word's meaning. At the beginning of a vocabulary unit I provide the students with a vocabulary matrix. In the first column, I now give the students a sentence which uses the word. I have the students read the sentence out loud, and then silently guess what the target word means. Each student then turns to his/her partner and provides a guess for the word's definition. I then provide the students with a concise definition as way for each student to check his or her understanding. Exposing the students to a new word in context allows them to practice the skill of using context clues to understand unfamiliar words. Frequently students get excited when their guess matches the definition of the word.

The next change I have made is having students brainstorm other words that originate from the same Greek or Latin root. This allows me to help students identify patterns of meaning in the English language. In addition, for each one word I teach directly, I am actually exposing the students to a few other words with related meanings. This works hand-in-hand with the Greek and Latin roots curriculum I use.

These three changes have improved my vocabulary instruction. Below I have included a sample vocabulary chart and the PowerPoint I use in my direct instruction. I would welcome any feedback or other ways to make my vocabulary instruction even better.

Vocabulary Chart
Vocabulary PPT